about me / ai clone
I got the lowest score in my calculus class at Cornell
A commenter said a 3.6 GPA is terrible and that my major was easy. Here is the whole record instead of an argument.
After the first exam in Calculus II my freshman fall, the professor put the grade distribution on the board: mean, median, mode, high, low. The low was mine. I had come in as a biology major who had never learned how to study, because high school never made me. I finished that class with a B+ against a class median of B, in a section of 163 people.
Junior year I called my twin brother from a party and told him I did not want to be a doctor. He said he had been thinking the same thing. I switched to computational biology, took CS 1110 Intro Computing Using Python, finished it with an A against a median of B, and spent that summer doing computational biology research at Princeton in the Singh Lab. I was still a biology major, so the computer science sat on top of a degree I was already finishing, including a semester of twenty three credit hours with discrete math, biochemistry and physics in it.
That is how the 3.631 happened, and Carnegie Mellon admitted me to a master's in software engineering on a full ride afterwards. Every figure here is on the transcript on screen.
Transcript
0:00I got the lowest score in my calculus class at Cornell.
0:02After the first exam in Calculus II, the professor wrote the whole grade distribution on the board: the mean, the median, the mode, the high, and the low.
0:11The low on that board was mine.
0:14I was a biology major who had never learned how to study, because high school had never made me do it.
0:19In college I found out that studying is a skill, and I was starting from nothing.
0:22So I learned how to study, and I finished Calculus II with a B plus, which put me above the class median of a B.
0:29Around that time I was also a competitive powerlifter, and I won the Ivy League Championship.
0:34Then my junior year I had an existential crisis.
0:37I was at a party, on the phone with my twin brother Justin, and I told him I did not want to go to medical school and I did not want to be a doctor.
0:45Justin said he had been thinking the exact same thing.
0:47So I switched to computational biology and took my first computer science class, intro computing in Python.
0:53I fell in love with it.
0:55That summer I did computational biology research at Princeton, and I finished that first computer science class with an A.
1:01I was still a biology major, so those computer science classes sat on top of a degree I was already finishing.
1:07One semester I took twenty three credit hours, including discrete math, biochemistry, and physics.
1:13That is how I got a three point six at Cornell.
1:16Carnegie Mellon then admitted me on a full ride, and I got a master's in software engineering there.
1:21That is what my terrible three point six was worth.
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